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7.30.2011

What Makes a Genuine Wizard

For Harry Potter fans, you all know that the main reason of his triumph over Voldemort is Harry's rightful ownership of the most powerful wand in the world (the stone, the cloak, and the wand all composes the Deathly Hallows). JK Rowling tells us that every wand has its own master and allegiance. But thinking that the experienced wizard Voldemort has no idea about this is very unrealistic, not counting that he cannot even make a physical contact with Harry (he needed another wizard to check Harry's pulses to verify his death). All these only made Voldemort a very lame and stupid enemy. Weak.

But nothing made the Harry Potter story (and the franchise) weaker than the wizard's use of wands. Anyone who reads countless epic fantasy series knows that in a duel/battle of spells and magics, a good or a badass wizard uses a staff, not wand. If you're familiar with Blizzard's all-time classic RPG + hack n slash game Diablo 2, the wand goes to the Necromancer and the Sorceress, but used as a minor weapon compared to the staff. This is one of the reasons why no matter how grandiose the Harry Potter series is (both the novels and the movies) it's still far from closing in on my top fantasy epic weaved by a British linguist and historian JRR Tolkien.